ICE and @tradexyz are bringing Hyperliquid-based perps to the U.S. Announced this morning, ICE will operate U.S. regulated versions of @tradexyz’s markets, leveraging their expertise as the leading deployer of real-world-asset perps on Hyperliquid. The new venue will operate separately to ICE’s institutional futures franchise and offer a trading experience designed for retail participation. U.S. traders will be able to trade 24/7 across a range of assets spanning the macro complex including: *Crypto 🪙 *Equities 📈 *Indices 📊 *Commodities🛢️ *Forex 💱 Read more 👇 Users will access the platform through U.S.-regulated FCMs performing KYC/AML screening, including ICE's joint venture with OKX. ICE and @tradexyz will seek regulatory approvals to launch a new market built on Hyperliquid to operate KYC-compliant perp markets, including approvals to support leveraged trading.

Jamie Dimon to a country that pulled its gold out of New York: you have three armies within 400 miles, while gold in America is protected by two oceans and the US military “If we have the strongest military in the world and the strongest economy in the world, we will be the preeminent reserve currency. It is those two things.” “I was in a country somewhere in the Middle East, and also in Europe, and the people said, we took our gold out of the vaults in New York City and moved it to our country. You know what I said to him? I said, you have three armies within 400 miles who can come take your gold.” “That’s the real world. You’re not thinking clearly about safety. That gold is protected by the Atlantic, the Pacific, the United States military, the rule of law.” “But if we are not the preeminent military and economy, you will see our reserve status come down.”

Pretty much. As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers. SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue. That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.

There's lots of demand for travel, so airline capacity keeps growing, even though airlines are bad businesses that don't earn their cost of capital and are constantly squeezed by oil, wages and aircraft costs. NVDA = Boeing/Airbus + GE/Safran (order-book pricing power, plus recurring aftermarket) 
Memory = refiners (windfall profits when supply is tight, until the cycle turns) 
Neoclouds = aircraft lessors (levered, contracted bets on the residual value of depreciating assets) 
Shells/power/cooling = airports (nothing flies without them, so they get built) 
Models = airlines (huge capex, price wars, compute is jet fuel, researchers are the pilots' union) 
Apps that own the customer = The frontier models are fighting commoditization but market forces are trying to commoditize them. If demand for intelligence is there (which it is), then the buildout will continue, even if returns are poor for many of the players. Travelers win. Airlines rarely do.

There is an absolute barrage of inference providers popping up that get to $1M/mo extremely quickly. This is the rough economics of inference providers: Even if you rent on-demand B300s at $8/GPU-hr, many open source models (GLM 5.3, Kimi K3, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash / Pro) can get you >$10-20/GPU-hr at reasonable throughputs (100tok/s). DeepInfer from DeepSeek directly shows they can get $38/GPU-hr on off-peak hours. Every chip / model has a different throughput / interactivity curve, but there is a lot of arbitrage between even high rental spot prices and token prices. New chips (Vera Rubins) also change this meaningfully. Your ability to be making gross margin relies on your utilization and how good your stack is. Gateways like OpenRouter, Vercel and more help solve that problem by aggregating demand to you. May inference providers discount their tokens to get longer term commits too. I've even heard stories of selling back Chinese model tokens to Chinese labs! One thorn in the economics of these players is that many Chinese open source model labs are now asking for rev share if you're at a certain scale, espp for pre-release access to their models for day 1 support. That further pushes the threshold to be in the money. The barrier to entry seems low and falling. There are even stories of smaller ones who can "vibe code" a way to stand up OSS models on a cluster they rent. And as a result, we're seeing 10s of such companies pop up almost every week and immediately skyrocketing revenue at low-ish gross margin and raising rounds on the back of that. Unsurprisingly, because the actual service provided seems commodity, this eventually drives up compute prices and drives down token prices. In theory, it would seem like neoclouds who have the lowest cost of compute and themselves have started inference businesses would win the race to the bottom (Crusoe Coreweave Nebius and GMI all have inference businesses), with larger players (Modal Fireworks Baseten) being second because they are well capitalized to make bigger compute commits cheaply and have demand (high utilization), but the reality is the pie is growing so quickly that even upstarts are absolutely crushing it and growing aggressively (inference dot net, DeepInfra, Wafer, Relace, Morph). Strategies vary across the board: neoclouds want to serve inference, inference players want to be neoclouds and do higher margin reserved instances / post training, and some want to go heterogeneous hardware or creatively flexible compute constructs. The risks are: do open source models continue to be competitive? Will their creators rent seek more? Will their shape change compute needs? How do different chips change economics? Who gets compute in a supply crunch? Below is a aggressive sketch of how gross margin scales with utilization for various models / chip sets. For now, there are many inference providers and they’re all ripping!